Who Discovered America? Not Christopher Columbus, That's for Certain

So Who Really Discovered America?

As often happens on Columbus Day, a federal holiday in the United States celebrated annually on the second Monday of October in honor of Christopher Columbus, the question arises: Who discovered America? Since many textbooks and historical annals of the preceding five centuries give Christopher Columbus the credit for "discovery" of the new world, one might wonder why anyone would bother asking such a question. One would think it quite evident who discovered America. But one would be wrong, because Christopher Columbus did not discover America, no more than he proved that the world was not flat.

Sailing off at the behest of the King and Queen of Spain to find a shorter passage to India may have been a brave thing to do, but Christopher Columbus' voyages and "discoveries" are questioned today because the science of archeology and common sense have given us alternate events that predate Christopher Columbus and that tell us that he wasn't the first human or the first European to set foot on an American shore.

First, common sense tells us he wasn't the first human in the Americas due to the fact that there were already "Indians" in the Americas. In fact, Christopher Columbus, after figuring out he was not in India, decided that slavery, subjugation, and religious oppression was the answer to the question of his discovery.

But before all that, before the European hordes that would descend on the native populations of North and South America due to Christopher Columbus' discovery of a New World for them to colonize and exploit, others set foot on American shores. In fact, there exists cartographic evidence, according to cartographic expert Armando Cortesao, that Portuguese explorers visited the Americas and mapped the area in 1424, but other than the map itself, there is no information.